


Henry Wonton 2: Electric Boogaloo

by starlight_firelight



Category: The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
Genre: Alternate Universe, Body Horror, Character Death, Inspired by Romeo and Juliet, Jack the Ripper Murders, M/M, as all should, my friend headcanons basil as japanese so naturally i've hopped on that bandwagon, this is an au of an au i might have lost the plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-10-17 05:44:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20615951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlight_firelight/pseuds/starlight_firelight
Summary: Henry Wotton has a terrible secret.





	Henry Wonton 2: Electric Boogaloo

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).

> This is a thing that was written as an AU for [this masterpiece.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20611457) Henry, the flower mentions are for you. Full credit to boff/henry for the wonderful title of this work
> 
> Trigger warnings for body horror, death, suicide, gore. (if I've missed something feel free to tell me and I'll add it in)

The day it turned sour was as normal a day as any. It was calm outside, and calmer inside the shared apartment of Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward. The years that they had been together _as friends_ had passed in that swift manner that things that are enjoyable are want to pass in. 

It began as a normal day. Basil awoke, scrambled eggs, arranged peonies, deep crimson roses, and monkshood in a vase to be placed on the centre table and went to wake up his friend. Henry always slept in later than Basil would like and went abed far too late, but old habits are not to be changed. 

Basil knocked on the door to the bedroom before opening it. They shared a bedroom, as they did most everything else, so there were two beds pushed against the wall; one was inhabited by a curled figure and was messy in all regards, the other was made up with careful and practised neatness. It was a good bedroom, as bedrooms go. Dark for the panelling of oak around the walls and for the Oriental carpets decorating the floor, but bright due to the large window set facing the door that showed a view of London that rivalled any.

He woke Henry and they made their quiet way into the kitchen to eat before they settled down to their respective labours. Basil would paint and Henry would read, and they would sit together in the same room basking in each other’s silent company. 

It was a normal day.

Just a normal day.

Then why did it feel off?

Henry had taken to going on long, late-night walks, from which he always returned tired and sullied in some way. A torn shirt sleeve, a scratch on his cheek, a soaked frock coat. Basil had taken to forcing himself to stay up late, if only to help his friend into bed if it happened to be a bad night. But the thing that was most on Basil’s mind, through all hours of the day, was one question. What did Henry do on his late-night walks? Basil pondered this through breakfast, as he painted the vase he had arranged earlier that day, through dinner and supper. 

The day felt wrong. Basil needed answers, and he felt that those two aspects were intertwined. All he needed to do would be to tail his friend on tonight’s walk, get his answers without disrupting the careful routine the two men had developed, and return home before his friend. He developed this plan throughout the day, turning it around and examining possible failures until he felt that it was mistake-proof as iron.

Henry left the building at 23:00, slipping on his black frock coat and covering his shock of ginger hair with a cap. 

Basil followed just after, donning the same manner of dark garb as his friend did. It was autumnal and cold in London, brown trees full of crackling leaves that had recently lost their green hues and dark cobblestones paved with days-old rainwater. The air was foggy with pollution, factory smoke worming its way into one’s lungs as if one had just taken a drag from a weak pipe. Henry made his way through Whitechapel along the bank of the Thames, slipping into alleyways and side-streets. Basil lost him for a moment, just a moment.

How he wished he had walked a little faster then. Perhaps he could have saved lives if he was a better man, a faster man.

Alas, he lost sight of his friend for fifteen agonising minutes, only finding his way again when he heard the shout of a woman, a scream that sliced through the air and into Basil’s chest. Something had happened, something terrible, he knew it. He picked up his pace to a sprint, chest heaving with effort and feet stinging from the constant pounding of London brick beneath his shoes.

He rounded a corner to see a scene so terrible he should never erase it from his eyelids, a forever echo to haunt him till death. 

Henry Wotton crouched over a figure that was small and pale, chest barely lifting with breath that faded from her too quickly, far too quickly, and wearing a dress that was once grey but now was red. In his hands, Henry held a knife covered in the same red that painted the skirts of the woman beneath him, twirling it in his fingers with languid care. He had lost his cap somewhere along the way, and her red was intermingled with the ginger of his hair. 

Basil inched closer, horror forcing him silent and morbid curiosity drawing him near. He recoiled at closer sight of the woman, for the things Henry had done were near to unspeakable. She was slit open at the abdomen, blood and flesh and muscle spilling about and mixing with rainwater, organs stinking and heart barely beating. She was all red and pale and lifeless. When she breathed her last breath, Henry turned around.

And saw Basil.

He blinked once, and lunged knife-first at his friend, unaware of his relations to the eavesdropper upon his crimes. Basil stumbled back, fear and horror and revulsion compelling him away from speech as Henry stabbed the knife deep into Basil's gut, splitting muscle and skin as easily as he might bread and pushing deeper and deeper until his hand reached Basil’s flesh, until it was _in_ him and stained with his blood and organ matter. The pain surfaced first as heat, gentle and uncaring and then morphed into something more, pressure and searing burning pain. Blood spilt from Basil and he fell with a scream, a final shout that reverberated through Whitechapel.

The world went dark and his ears rang, loud and sharp. His pain was fading but he got the sense that it was still there, that it was not it that left him but was he himself leaving, going on to darkness and then to nothing.

The ringing in his ears ceased, the pain ceased, and then Basil ceased. 

There was silence, finally, silence.

Henry Wotton stood up from where his hidden voyeur had just died, and took the time to kick the corpse around. He wanted to see the face of the man he had slaughtered, as he always did. His murderee had had long hair, soft and brown still streaked with sunlight. His face was gentle and kind and it belonged to someone.

Basil.

The moment he felt that hair, saw that face, Henry knew that there was no untruth, no trick. His friend of all ages, his one love in life and his reason to continue lay in front of him, murdered as brutally as the corpse that sat behind him.

Time seemed to slow with this realisation, move around him like treacle trying to get out of a jar. Basil, who sat with him when he cried over the loss of his cat. Who woke him up in the mornings and greeted him with breakfast, who sometimes painted his shock of ginger hair, who would reach out and touch each freckle on Henry’s cheeks and compliment them all with that silly lovestruck smile he donned only for him. Basil, who had an art exhibition coming up, who’s unfinished last still-life for said exhibition sat propped on an easel in the hall. Basil, who would never breathe again. Basil, who had crossed a continent and an ocean to get here from his home, who kept trinkets his mother gave to him before he left Japan on a ship and sailed mistakenly to Henry.

What was life, without Basil Hallward?

Cold. Empty. Nothing. Bare and broken as the nighttime streets of London.

Henry did not want that life. He looked at his hands and curled away with disgust at them, blood dripping from them and bits of intestine stuck in his fingernails that stank with more rancid a scent than any butcher could hope to produce. Henry retook the knife with which he had murdered his friend, hands shaking so much that he feared he would not be able to finish the job.

He placed the knife on a space over his heart, slotted it between his ribs with an ease that only comes from practise, and pushed. 

It hurt for a moment, burned as if he was being branded, but it did not hurt as much as seeing the corpse of his friend laid out beneath him did. He crumpled, first to his knees and then when he was no longer able to hold himself up at all, into the corpse of Basil. 

He let the world fade from view against the no-longer-moving chest of his friend, welcomed the darkness with open arms as he became no more sentient than his friend, as his corpse joined the pile. His last thought was of rotting together with Basil Hallward, of them becoming one in death as they strived to be in life.


End file.
